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Post by Lee on Sept 3, 2009 8:44:45 GMT -1
yes. part of it. i am not sure that is the motivation though. i am beginning to think that part of what motivates us is a need to feel part of the whole web of nature again. not in the romantic notion of living in the iron age as noble savages, but to recapture 'something' they had that we lack today but in a modern context. possibly to recapture something humans as a whole have lost in our progression away from being animals in a widely intricate system and turning ourselves inot an isolated species separated from the web of life by our concrete and steel and technology.
more later... work needs doing and i cant skive any longer.
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Post by redraven on Sept 3, 2009 11:45:01 GMT -1
So, stumbling through the darkness of intent, seemingly without the illumination of knowledge, we come to the unexpected, yet wonderful realization that there are others, others who hold similar aspirations. That is the most 'Bob-feline' statement I've read on here for ages!!! We certainly are stumbling through the darkness of intent. Possible also the mist of lack of knowing, and the forest of uncertainty, probing for the profound rush of shimmering clarity that we call awen, exquishite inshpiration... (just teasing RR ) Of course it is, who's doing the TDN talk? (or should I throw in a Megli moment here?) RR
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Post by megli on Sept 3, 2009 13:12:42 GMT -1
Oh are you?! When's that?
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Post by megli on Sept 3, 2009 13:24:01 GMT -1
i know you can be a horribly cynical git - and long may it remain that way - but i think in this rant you are possibly doing what many of us have done before, to take small isolated aspects and used it to extrapolate outwards and make a judgement on a religious life 2000 years ago when in fact we simply do not know. No doubt you're right. I was being very cynical! Though I do think the robustly unsentimental, communal, and even (to us) 'unspiritual' nature of much ancient religion does need to be stressed more than we do. The majority of Greeks and Romans, and I suspect most Britons and Gauls, would have found the idea of a 'personal spiritual path' a very weird one---which is why the Mysteries, and later, oriental cults (Christianity included) were so popular: they offered something than the basic religious life of the society lacked. But, that aside, I restress the idea that 21st century life has made a large swathe of the specifically religious concerns of ancient Brythonic peoples simply irrelevant. (If no one at all ever mentioned Amaethon again, we'd still have food to eat; we go to the GP not to Nodons' temple at Lydney.) And what replaces their ancient 'subsistence spirituality' (to coin a phrase) is, for us, an increased degree of personal love and, dare I say it, of what might be construed by the unfriendly as 'lifestyle choice'---it simply isn't a matter of life and death for most of us, and those who insist that it is run the risk of coming across as mildly hysterical. So the value of Brythonic spirituality (if this a valid term?) lies in its potential adaptability to modern concerns: an adaptability which it may or may not possess. Can it sustain a mystical and devotional superstructure---which will be necessary to hold people's attention and offer them fulfilment---erected upon the foundations of such problematic sources as we have? I often think this is why Wicca is the most successful neo-Pagan religion---it's deeply, deeply influenced by a Christian substrate that makes it 'feel' subjectively familiar. Twenty years ago Pat Crowther, Lois Bourne, Viv Crowley et al. used to say they knew Wicca was for them because it seemed deeply homely and instinctively familiar, and they thought they must have been members of the Craft of the Wyse in a previous incarnation. ('Once a witch, always a witch' etc.) Actually, it's because Wicca is quite High Anglican beneath the surface--incense, candles, small communities of devotees, a threefold hierarchy (deacon, priest, bishop; 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree), beautiful objects, nice litugical poetry, a yearly cycle of feast-days with different associated colours and vestments, a martyrology, odd bits of the liturgy that aren't in English, and a King Jamesey feeling when they are, and, most of all, a sense both of deep devotionalism to divinity and of divinity's personal interest in you, the worshipper. Take Victorian high-church Anglicanism, add back the women, sex and the body that Christianity had supressed, and you get Wicca. And it seems to me that people found and continue to find that sense of the kookily radical and the quintessentially 'English' combined very emotionally and spiritually satisfying, which I don't find in the least surprising. (It explains the genius of Kate Bush as well... ) Old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist; young women in white robes walking to the esbat through the evening mist. How strangely things that seem superficially opposed are often related below the surface.
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Post by Adam on Sept 3, 2009 19:31:43 GMT -1
But, that aside, I restress the idea that 21st century life has made a large swathe of the specifically religious concerns of ancient Brythonic peoples simply irrelevant. (If no one at all ever mentioned Amaethon again, we'd still have food to eat; we go to the GP not to Nodons' temple at Lydney.) And what replaces their ancient 'subsistence spirituality' (to coin a phrase) is, for us, an increased degree of personal love and, dare I say it, of what might be construed by the unfriendly as 'lifestyle choice'---it simply isn't a matter of life and death for most of us, and those who insist that it is run the risk of coming across as mildly hysterical. So the value of Brythonic spirituality (if this a valid term?) lies in its potential adaptability to modern concerns: an adaptability which it may or may not possess. Can it sustain a mystical and devotional superstructure---which will be necessary to hold people's attention and offer them fulfilment---erected upon the foundations of such problematic sources as we have? Agreed... I for one would have taken the above as a presupposition so fundamental I don't think it would have occurred to me to vocalise it. And maybe it needs to be (vocalised, that is). 21st century living has profoundly altered the relevance of religious concerns of any culture under it's sway, but I think that Lee had a point in his earlier point about the need felt by many to reconnect with the world. While the Brythonic culture of 2000 yrs ago will have had very specific concerns that their religion addressed, so does the 21st century. The same is true of the survivor religions (primarily thinking Christianity) which have changed to meet those needs, while remaining generally pretty conservative. Core to my pleasure in the work you guys do is the language work on, for example river names. I could opt for a purely 21st century animism (appropriating indigenous practices left right and centre if I so saw fit), but I find my spiritual experience broadened and connected to something other than my own philosophical ponderings by contemplating a body of myth (medieval or otherwise), the stories presented by Heron, the names of river Gods/Spirits teased out by yourself and others, and by being in touch with a community not afraid to call a muppet a muppet, even when that muppet is me. To date, this community meets religious needs for me that no other has done, truer to my own experience while enriching it. Actually, if it never did any more, that too would be cool.
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Post by Heron on Sept 3, 2009 19:53:59 GMT -1
[...] I often think this is why Wicca is the most successful neo-Pagan religion---it's deeply, deeply influenced by a Christian substrate that makes it 'feel' subjectively familiar. Twenty years ago Pat Crowther, Lois Bourne, Viv Crowley et al. used to say they knew Wicca was for them because it seemed deeply homely and instinctively familiar, and they thought they must have been members of the Craft of the Wyse in a previous incarnation. ('Once a witch, always a witch' etc.) Actually, it's because Wicca is quite High Anglican beneath the surface--incense, candles, small communities of devotees, a threefold hierarchy (deacon, priest, bishop; 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree), beautiful objects, nice litugical poetry, a yearly cycle of feast-days with different associated colours and vestments, a martyrology, odd bits of the liturgy that aren't in English, and a King Jamesey feeling when they are, and, most of all, a sense both of deep devotionalism to divinity and of divinity's personal interest in you, the worshipper. Take Victorian high-church Anglicanism, add back the women, sex and the body that Christianity had supressed, and you get Wicca. And it seems to me that people found and continue to find that sense of the kookily radical and the quintessentially 'English' combined very emotionally and spiritually satisfying, which I don't find in the least surprising. (It explains the genius of Kate Bush as well... ) Old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist; young women in white robes walking to the esbat through the evening mist. How strangely things that seem superficially opposed are often related below the surface. That's quite some insight. And the obverse is, what ... that for heathens or brythons the gods are not necessarily interested in us, that if we follow them we may not get a response, or we have to cajole one out of them? I don't know. What you are saying is very suggestive in that the social structure of wicca does indeed seem to be a mirror image of that type of Christianity. I'm wondering where that leaves us. Vainly pursuing a religion that we can never socially construct? It doesn't quite feel like that to me.
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Post by Heron on Sept 3, 2009 20:03:42 GMT -1
I could opt for a purely 21st century animism (appropriating indigenous practices left right and centre if I so saw fit), but I find my spiritual experience broadened and connected to something other than my own philosophical ponderings by contemplating a body of myth (medieval or otherwise), ... That's pretty much how I feel
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Post by Francis on Sept 4, 2009 9:02:40 GMT -1
Great thread. Lots of replies back I want to make but have to follow Lee's good example and actually go and do some work!
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Post by megli on Sept 5, 2009 7:54:27 GMT -1
That's quite some insight. And the obverse is, what ... that for heathens or brythons the gods are not necessarily interested in us, that if we follow them we may not get a response, or we have to cajole one out of them? I don't know. What you are saying is very suggestive in that the social structure of wicca does indeed seem to be a mirror image of that type of Christianity. I'm wondering where that leaves us. Vainly pursuing a religion that we can never socially construct? It doesn't quite feel like that to me. Not sure. What I'm doing is pointing out that, as people who've grown up in a culturally Christian background, we all have certain expectations of what religion is for that may well be shaped unconsciously by a Christian example, even for people who feel that Christianity is utterly irrelevant to them. Thus we may be looking for something, bringing certain expectations to the table, which won't be satisfied unless we acknowledge them. The satisfying genius of Wicca seems to me to lie in its fusing of the (sexually) radical and the (environmentally, liturgically) conservative and atavistic. It slots neatly into a part of the English psyche---I say 'English' and not British deliberately--that includes chalk-cut horses, Robin Hood, the Forest of Arden, Waterhouse's 'Hylas and the Nymphs', William Morris, Hardy's 'The Woodlanders', and Kate Bush. (The Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate has recently dubbed this complex of ideas and emotions 'deep England'.) To an extent, pagan Druidry of the OBOD and TDN kind---overwhelmingly an English phenomenon---also partakes of this sense of 'deep England', which tends to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as arising from a profound and happy fusion of Celt and Saxon. In other words, there are identifiable reasons why the first and most successful forms of neo-Paganism have not been reconstructionist polytheisms. In a sense, actual paganism has never been the real point of Paganism. The god and goddess of Wicca are, after all, deities who were worshipped by no ancient people of the British Isles, but are rather sublime 'metadivinities' that owe something to the syncretic thinking of urban Hellenistic Egypt in the early centuries AD.
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Post by Heron on Sept 6, 2009 15:53:06 GMT -1
The satisfying genius of Wicca seems to me to lie in its fusing of the (sexually) radical and the (environmentally, liturgically) conservative and atavistic. It slots neatly into a part of the English psyche---I say 'English' and not British deliberately--that includes chalk-cut horses, Robin Hood, the Forest of Arden, Waterhouse's 'Hylas and the Nymphs', William Morris, Hardy's 'The Woodlanders', and Kate Bush. (The Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate has recently dubbed this complex of ideas and emotions 'deep England'.) Bate's 'Deep England' is certainly a response I recognise, but I think it's quite complex and by no means a watertight category either in the sense of what might or what might not, be included for particular groups or individuals, or the sense that some of the items which could be included might overlap with the category 'Deep Wales/Cymru' or 'Deep Scotland'. Of the list you give, I wouldn't have thought that Waterhouse's 'Hylas and the Nymphs' would necessarily be restricted to England. I have thought about this quite a bit in relation to Wales over the years. There is certainly a 'Cymru Dwfn' which is really only fully accessible to Welsh speakers, embedded as it is in the language and related to at various levels of depth by those with a less complete grasp of the language or by Welsh people who do not speak Welsh, and by them in turn to varying degrees depending on where in Wales they live and their individual commitment to Welsh rather than British identity. The Welsh philosopher J.R. Jones, in his book Prydeindod, analyses the effects of this range of distances from the Welsh language and the implications for personal identity, suggesting that some individuals, or even whole communities, are stranded in a no-man's land between English and Welsh identities. That is contestable, of course, and there certainly is a 'deep' Anglo-Welsh identity centred on the S Wales valleys which might not be fully accessible to Welsh-speakers in the North and might, in some respects, overlap with, say, ex-coal-mining areas in Yorkshire. Set against this it might be useful to return to your own recent citation of David Jones who tried to articulate a 'Deep Britain' ethos which included things from 'Deep Wales' (the Marwnad for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Y Mabinogi, the specifically Welsh Arthurian material) with 'Deep England' within the overall context of 'Deep Europe'. This was not always understood even by his close friends and associates. René Hague (an Irishman), commenting on David Jones's work after his death, insensitively claimed that all that was essential about him was English and that the Welsh material was crudely expressed and superficial, though as far as I'm concerned nothing could be further from the truth. Jones was born in England of an English mother and a Welsh father, but I'm not sure that this is necessary to be in a position to fathom elements of both Deep England and Deep Wales, and/or presumably Deep Scotland i f you are able to engage fully with the historical, linguistic and contemporary social life of each country. Engaging with depth in this way will always be a selective process even if done just for one culture (not everyone reads Shakespeare) and any given individual might have a complex range of 'deep' engagements with a range of cultural deposits and across cultures they are tied into in one way or another, while others will never stray far from the shallow-end of the culture pool. I take that point absolutely. But that still leaves the question of what we can do. If witches can construct a workable worshipping culture out of invented or appropriated gods, why should we balk at doing so with historically identified deities because we can't be sure about every aspect of their historical validity? The point is, surely, that we can work from an historical base to decide what is appropriate for us and just get on and do it. Whatever the reality of life in previous ages, our religion will of course reflect our own history and the expectations arising from that.
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Post by megli on Sept 6, 2009 16:29:35 GMT -1
I take both of those---most beautifully expressed, as always---points. 'Deepness' is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, partly because of reading the French nouvelle droite philosopher Alain de Benoiste's 'On Being a Pagan': he starts from a place much like we are articulating here, yet ends up in a place which I find politically abhorrent, a kind of ghastly sub-Nietzschean neo-fascism.
But that's by the bypass: I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis here, Heron, which is much richer than my own was. I've never heard of J R Jones---I'll have to seek out Prydeindod.
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Post by Francis on Sept 8, 2009 9:55:49 GMT -1
Forgive me if this is just poorly stitched together nonsense – I’m home with a restless toddler who generously allows me to not have to focus my whole attention on him for sometimes up to as long as 30 seconds at a time!
I think you’re quite right to talk of deepness in this way, although I’m less convinced about the national element of it. The ‘Deep England’ Megli describes strikes me as a bit of a nostalgic Waugh (minus the Catholicism) – like dream of the Home Counties. A truly different ‘deepness’ to that of a proud northerner, practising his cornet before plonking a flat cap on his head and walking his whippet to the pigeon loft on his allotment! Of course a few decades of shared t.v. experience is starting to replace everyones once locally varied experience of life with a shared monotony and desperation… I’m being deliberately facetious but not intending any offense!
I think the overlapping, and graded for depth, sense of shared “Deepness” that exists and formed the shared ‘dreamtime’ that led to the appeal of the first neo-paganisms in England, more reflects a shared sense of nostalgia and longing for a lost connection with the land (rather than the drive people have for re-connection). Of course it had to be dressed up in terms of a clean English Arcadia to suit the educated pretensions of its founders – had it been a real paganism rooted in the soil, wet, moor, woodland and wool that makes up the greater area of our island then such a pagansim may never have caught on. I think Megli’s quite right to suggest the appeal of neo-paganism has never been about the paganism (in terms of deity). I believe it’s about the loss of connection and ‘place’ or position/situation/location/rootedness in the landscape – it’s about the loss of a sense of ‘Cynefin’.
I think neo-paganism's appeal has been more about it appearing to offer a route to regaining this sense of cynefin with the land- your place within the landscape. I think as one of the first post-industrial nations with a population that’s grown apart from the land for a couple of generations, and most importantly has time on its hands, freed as it is now from anxieties about food, shelter and warmth – then it is the innate human drive to Cynefin that has made neo-paganism appeal to so many. Has it grown out of a sense of Deep England and shared cultural themes? I don’t think so. I think the appeal is an innate human drive to be in a state of Cynefin, rather than a shared cultural collection of themes, memes, archetypes and symbolism. It’s not a dream of the past, or of shared cultural motifs – it’s the scratching of an itch of an innate animal drive.
Why did the first neo-paganism become so popular in england? – because it was the first thing to suggest such a route. In more recent times it’s become massively over shadowed by the new religion of the environment of anthropogenic climate change (and watching your carbon footprint), recycling and organic food – suggesting the promise of relationship with the land, but ultimately only delivering an unsatisfying non-local relationship by proxy.
Of course the latest route to scratch this itch is offered by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver and their urge to grow your own food – at least this offers the secular chance to get the soil under your fingernails. I don’t think it will fully offer the soul-deep ‘cynefin’ that many people will still find they desire. Perhaps what we’re trying to do here might offer some people the chance to get closer still to meeting this innate drive for relationship with Place, Spirit of Place and Deity?
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Post by megli on Sept 8, 2009 12:52:09 GMT -1
Yep, I half-take your point--but I don't think the shared-cultural-nostalgia thing and the longing for 'cynefin' are incompatible when analysing the historical matrix of the emergence of neo-paganism.
Rather, I think *both* are present in the DNA, as it were, of the modern collection of paths, but I think the latter has become stronger over the last 30 years, whereas the former was stronger before. (If it was all about nature and cynefin, none of those early Wiccans would have practiced in the notorious 'centrally-heated London flat!')
Indeed, as Hutton shows in 'The Triumph of the Moon', Wicca absolutely and undoubtedly *did* grow 'out of a sense of Deep England and shared cultural themes', with a strong occult, classically-learned side to it as well, and that it was the exportation of paganism to the States after the 60s that really ecologised it---that turned a fabricated 1940s semi-magical neo-fertility cult into 'nature religion'. (Chas Clifton has noted that the 'religion of nature' had long been an important part of American national identity and high culture---Thoreau, Whitman, etc---but was not so to the fore in the UK at the time.) Infused with American eco-feminism and a Thoreauvian 'Life in the Woods' tone, paganism returned to the UK from the US radically ecologised, and with nature, not occult fripperies, at the heart of it. The Rae Beth 'Hedge Witch' idea of the 90s also did a lot to set the practising British pagan in the context of hill and stream and woodland and locale, in a rather 'Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady' way. Before that, a lot of paganism had been about dressing up in a nightie and calling on Isis and Osiris in a sandalwood-reeking cellar, as Germaine Greer once noted witheringly.
So I don't think it was 'suggesting...a route' to local connection with nature and place that got Wicca (as the only form of paganism popular till the 70s) kickstarted and made it so popular---I think that had more to do with the glamour of calling yourself a witch and doing something excitingly counter-cultural. (This persists: when I worked for all those years in a Wiccan shop, none of the 'newby' customers came in to buy a Scott Cunningham or an athame because they were natural nature mystics, in love with the local environment. They wanted the glam-factor of wearing too much eyeliner/henna/black-clothes/tie-dye and calling themselves Sheba-walks-abroad-o'-nights.) I would also question how important that search for local connection was to the kind of pagan-ish druid orders around in the 1960s---not at all to some, I suspect.
The urge to localise, to find cynefin---which I absolutely concur about, being a country boy raised very rurally, who finds cities difficult--seems to me a second wave within the historical development of neo-paganism, and yet actually to be much closer to the point of the whole thing, as you so rightly say. I supose this readjustment of the nature of the religion(s) also coincides with the emergence of the non-aligned pagan, who's not Wiccan or a druid or anything, but who is just 'pagan'. I get the impression that's a phenomenon that became widespread in the early 90s.
We've walked a funny old road, really, and we shouldn't underestimate the radicalness of what we're doing.
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Post by redraven on Sept 9, 2009 19:00:51 GMT -1
My interest in Wicca lasted precisely for two books, both discarded after approx half read. It's possible that I was unfortunate to have picked up some dross, but the over-riding sense I got from them was the placating of the ego by the attempted manipulation of both physical and non physical means. Of course, it's possible that behind the scenes, there may be some well driven focussed covens, but I made no connection with the ideology whatsoever. The sense of "deepness" mentioned earlier, in my experience, has been as a result of a connection with locality first. When you start to "see" through the wall of self interest, into the wider environment, egoic interests start to evaporate and you experience something deeper. My own experiences actually bring me back to the original purpose of this thread as it could be viewed as a trance state almost. There is an area near me which, when I am close to it, starts to almost shimmer before me and the best way I can describe the feeling would be akin to the sensation one may experience stood close to the edge of a cliff. This connection is not dependent upon any placation I may suggest to the benefit of any named or unnamed deities, but continues to develop without any apparent agenda, and would appear to me to be mutually beneficial to both parties. And this is where I think the difference in early and later neo-paganism is pronounced, for I sense, for want of a better word, that movement away from self satisfaction into a meaningful relationship with locality and, IMO, this is part of the reasoning behind the emergence of the eco spirituality that is on the rise. I suspect people now want a different type of relationship with spirit and deity that is not dependent upon placation or subservience from one or both parties.
RR
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Post by Heron on Sept 9, 2009 21:02:33 GMT -1
I think you’re quite right to talk of deepness in this way, although I’m less convinced about the national element of it. ....... I, like Megli, endorse your comments about Cynefin, but also don't think it can be separated from cultural depth. I'm sure that what Megli says is right about many of the urban witches simply adopting it as a sort of fashion statement. But sticking with people who we might acknowledge as serious pagans, I think it is certainly the case that the experience being sought is a direct experience of Nature rather than any sort of cultural engagement. But it seems to me that, in spite of the nature of the experience sought, it is only at that level of perception that finds certain things 'deep' that we make this connection with Nature. So, to take some of the 'Deep England' references from the Jonathan Bate argument mentioned by Megli, 'a wood near Athens', the Forest of Arden, the pastoral landscape of, in particular, many of Shakespeare's 'comedies' becomes to seem like 'Deep England' - even where it is Illyria - to those that engage with them partly because of Shakespeare's particular genius for the almost casual presentation of this background depth but also because they become synonymous with what is sought for in Nature, a mythologised 'cynefin' which is an almost exact parallel of the desire to find significance in Nature which leads people to paganism. Wordsworth's 'Leech Gatherer who is encountered on the lonely moor "like one that I have met with in a dream" is a secular equivalent of a visitor from the Otherworld, the same poet's experiences above Tintern Abbey make him declare himself "a worshipper of nature". People responding to these things do so on the same level of sentiment that makes them find Nature itself 'deep' because, perceptually, the experience works in a analagous way. I happened to be hanging around waiting for a meeting in a school a while back and I went into the library and began casually looking at a book about Kenneth Graham, the author of 'The Wind in the Willows' and ended up skim-reading much of it. Before writing his famous book which might be some people's childhood experience of a mythologised England with its riverside and forest animals and the appearance of Pan 'at the gates of dawn', Graham had published a book of essays entitled 'Pagan Papers' (an outraged reviewer concluded "the author appears not to be a Christian'!). But the point is that the book suggested that he was in fact a suppressed pagan in the sense that he couldn't have conceived of actually practising paganism, but he did create a microcosmic culture in which that paganism could operate. It seemed to him to be part of the world he retreated to in the countryside from his job in the Bank of England. And for many others who may not have a deeper engagement they can be immersed with him in 'Deep England' which he himself saw as precisely constituting his paganism. For others, of course 'Deep England/Scotland/Wales' is just going down the pub or eating fish and chips, and it doesn't have to be linked to paganism, or even be particularly deep in the intellectual sense. And cultural affiliations are often more complex than this analysis suggests as I argued in my comments on Megli's post. But for pagans who probe the depths of cynefin the embedded cultural deposits in which cynefin has meaning will always be a background - whether sharply focused or hazy - to that probing, and I would suggest mentally inseparable from it. Is Ifan Goch an elemental part of Nature or or part of the Culture of the Dyffryn Conwy? Surely he must be both.
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Post by Adam on Sept 9, 2009 22:07:31 GMT -1
Also, in modern times Derren Brown. His mimmicking of all such phenomena is startling. Look out for his series 'Messiah' which perfectly illustrates this as well as his victorian meduimship. BTW He is an ex born again christian & an evangelical atheist. He always states he doesn't use hypnosis in his shows (Legal license reasons) but if you see his TV shows or even better, get to see him live. You will witness a masterclass in the art of suggestion. Just watched "The Gathering" on C4 again... if you caught it, I'm the balding goatee'd guy in the black shirt in the front row next to Henrietta :-)
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Post by dreamguardian on Sept 10, 2009 18:05:55 GMT -1
Also, in modern times Derren Brown. His mimmicking of all such phenomena is startling. Look out for his series 'Messiah' which perfectly illustrates this as well as his victorian meduimship. BTW He is an ex born again christian & an evangelical atheist. He always states he doesn't use hypnosis in his shows (Legal license reasons) but if you see his TV shows or even better, get to see him live. You will witness a masterclass in the art of suggestion. Just watched "The Gathering" on C4 again... if you caught it, I'm the balding goatee'd guy in the black shirt in the front row next to Henrietta :-) I gonna have to take a look now
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Post by Francis on Sept 13, 2009 22:55:34 GMT -1
I hope to get the last of the hay in tomorrow, and then at last will get back to this!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2009 10:01:23 GMT -1
I really like what you said here Heron:
"If witches can construct a workable worshipping culture out of invented or appropriated gods, why should we balk at doing so with historically identified deities because we can't be sure about every aspect of their historical validity? The point is, surely, that we can work from an historical base to decide what is appropriate for us and just get on and do it. Whatever the reality of life in previous ages, our religion will of course reflect our own history and the expectations arising from that."
It's very close to things that have been in the fore of my mind for some time. One would hope that being culturally and historically grounded to what ever extent is possible given the state of knowledge puts us in a place to construct something a more mature and richer than the Swiss-Army-Knife goddess and god for all occassions that wicca provides. That being said I stopped describing myself as a 'reconstructionist' when I had children. I'm just a polytheist now, a constructed one, lol. A person keeping a hearth as a sacred place to raise children and teach them stories and practices just has to settle with something and get on and do it, as you say, at some point. Sometimes I find that new factual discoveries broaden my understanding of a particular god and opens up a new 'feel' for them, and thus contact. But by and large I think any authentic experience goes beyond names, though it may have started with them.
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